Beautiful Velázquez, found in storage

A beautiful work of art has been found in storage.

Curators often rummage through museum storage hoping to find a great painting or just a curiosity overlooked by their predecessors. But it’s not every day that they find a canvas that they identify as an early masterpiece by Diego Velázquez, as John Marciari has. Marciari, now curator of European paintings at the San Diego Museum of Art, has published an article in the new issue of the Madrid quarterly Ars making the case that an unidentified painting in storage at the Yale University Art Gallery is actually an altarpiece by the Spanish master. The journal says the Yale work “could be this master’s most significant find for more than a century.”

At the Yale gallery, the curator of early European art Laurence Kanter calls the discovery all the more remarkable because museums today so rarely have the chance to acquire a work by Velázquez, an enormously influential narrative and portrait painter who was already celebrated and collected in his lifetime.

As Kanter points out, Velázquez “has never been out of favor. From the beginning, he has been one of the great, canonical painters of the Western tradition, and because he worked for the kings of Spain, most of his work is still in that country.”More than 5 feet by 4 feet, “The Education of the Virgin” shows the young Virgin Mary learning how to read at the hands of her mother, St. Anne, with her father, St. Joachim, looking on. Given to Yale in the 1920s by alumni Henry Hotchkiss Townshend and his brother Raynham, the oil on canvas was previously listed as the work of an unknown 17th-century Spanish painter.

Marciari first saw it in early 2004, when he was a junior curator at the Yale gallery working for Kanter. They were going through new storage facilities, with an eye toward reinstalling the galleries.

“The Education of the Virgin,” missing paint in spots and trimmed at the top, looked “pretty beat up,” Marciari says. “It was dirty, with a bit of tissue paper stuck on the canvas to hold the paint in place. This is how you find paintings in storage everywhere.”

But even then, he said, the painting stood out, much as the figures themselves emerge dramatically from the darkness. “I definitely thought it was a compelling painting. But it wasn’t until a few months later, when I pulled out the painting again from storage, that it hit me: This is an early Velázquez.”